Le Pen’s far-right vision: Retooling France at home, abroad
PARIS — No more Muslim headscarves in public. All schoolchildren in uniforms. Laws proposed and passed by referendum. Generous social services unavailable to foreigners unless they’ve held a job for five years.
That’s just a sampling of Marine Le Pen’s vision for France if the far-right leader wins Sunday’s presidential runoff election against incumbent Emmanuel Macron. In all things, France, and the French, would come first.
Polls portray Macron as the front-runner in Sunday’s vote, but a Le Pen win is possible — an outcome that could rock France’s system of governance, strike fear among its immigrants and Muslims, jolt the dynamics of the 27-nation European Union, and unnerve NATO allies.
Macron, 44, a centrist who is ardently pro-EU, has relentlessly blasted his adversary as a danger and framed their election showdown as an ideological battle for the soul of the nation. Le Pen, 53, views Macron as a progressive technocrat for whom France is just a “region” of the EU.
She says she would retool the country’s political system and the French Constitution to accommodate her populist agenda, putting the EU into second place and making France truer to its bedrock principles.
“I intend to be the president who gives the people back their voices in their own country,” Le Pen said.
Critics fear a threat to democracy under Le Pen, a nationalist who is cozy with Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orban, and anti-immigrant far-right parties elsewhere in Europe. Le Pen met with Russian President Vladimir Putin before the 2017 French presidential vote that she lost to Macron in a landslide.
The United States has long considered France its oldest ally, but a Le Pen presidency could pose a problem for the Biden administration by undermining trans-Atlantic unity over sanctions against Russia and by bolstering autocratic populists elsewhere in Europe.
The National Rally leader also is wary of free-trade deals and would seek a more independent stance for France in the United Nations and other multilateral bodies.
In a column Thursday in several European newspapers, the center-left leaders of Germany, Spain and Portugal all backed Macron, raising a warning about “populists and the extreme right” who hold Putin “as an ideological and political model, replicating his chauvinist ideas.”
“They have echoed his attacks on minorities and diversity and his goal of nationalist uniformity,” wrote German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S nchez and Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa.
Le Pen’s meeting five years ago with Putin has haunted her campaign amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, even though she has condemned the Russian invasion “without ambiguity.”
But if she were president, Le Pen said she would think twice about supplying Ukraine with weapons and would oppose energy sanctions against Moscow — for the sake of French pocketbooks and for the Russian people.
She also said she would pull France out of NATO’s military command, weakening the Western military alliance’s united front against Moscow, and that there should be a “strategic rapprochement” with Russia once the war is over, echoing the past position of Macron, who has tried his own outreach with Putin.
Still, his government says it has sent more than $108 million in weapons to Ukraine since the war started, and France has been central to the West’s ever-tougher sanctions against Russia.
Le Pen has projected a nurturing image throughout her campaign, saying she would oversee France as “the mother of the family.” She has focused on the purchasing power of consumers while standing firm on emblematic issues that define the far right, such as immigration, security, national identity and sovereignty.
To soften the blow of rising prices, Le Pen wants to slash taxes on energy bills from 20 percent to 5.5 percent. She promises to put $162-$216 per month back in consumers’ pockets.
Macron, a former French economy minister and banker, considers such measures misdirected and economically unviable.
Le Pen insists her agenda addresses the “France of the forgotten” that he has ignored. She has proposed a “referendum revolution” as the centerpiece of her plan to help heal the “democratic fracture” that she says accounts for low turnout in recent French elections and growing social discord.
Laws could be passed by referendum — bypassing elected lawmakers - after supporters gather the signatures of 500,000 eligible voters, That was a demand of the sometimes violent “yellow vest” movement that challenged Macron’s presidency two years ago.
“During my mandate, I count on consulting the only expert that Emmanuel Macron never consulted — the people,” Le Pen said this month.